“Blessed are the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers.” Simon and Garfunkle
“He who turns away from this Beauty hath also turned away from the messengers of the past, and showeth pride towards God from all eternity to all eternity.” Bahá’u'lláh
Ramen. (In case the picture makes no sense.)
So I’ve managed to churn out quite a bit of writing over the past few years, and most of it is centered around how we use our beliefs to make sense of the world. It’s all scattered over several forums, though, so I’m on a mission to consolidate the good bits here.
To give this all a bit of context, I’m reading Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom” at work between calls. The bits and pieces of my worldview that I’m most interested in collecting (for now, at least) are the ones that have to do with establishing an objective frame of reference for determining good and evil. Working in reverse chronological order (sort of, except for when I won’t), these posts will basically be my response to the impulse to conform to a set authoritarian belief system. Eventually, I’ll be digging around to some of the writing I was doing back in 2004, when I was pretty well convinced that God was real, Muhammad was his prophet, and Bahá’u'lláh was the holy man who had come back to add the finishing touches to the legacy of Divine Revelation. Should be some scary reading there, but I’ll try to make sense of it all. So then, much to say… we’ll start with this: (9/16/2006, gameknot)
Topic: Proving God doesn’t exist? Something about a teapot…
Again we have this “reasons for nonexistence” issue when it should be the other way around. I’d like an example of a time (other than, say, religious debates) when good science has ever come from misplacing the burden of proof. I’ll give an example where it didn’t work too well… alchemy. I’ll give another… the geocentric model of the Universe. More? There’s always the belief that one race is intellectually or genetically superior to another… These are all scientific principles founded on the belief that something “should” be true, but ultimately abandoned through a lack of supporting evidence and a failure to explain natural occurences. This does not mean that they did not have ardent believers among both scientists and philosophers in their day! They were still wrong. Burden of proof does indeed apply in the sciences, and ignoring it can and does lead to serious errors (occasionally with dire consequences for all of humanity.)
Still, lets make this all a bit more concrete with respect to the divide between science and religion. I read my daughter to sleep at night with a great book of myths from around the world. She loves them, I love them, it’s tons of fun for the whole family. Why I should somehow believe that one culture’s creation myths and accompanying divine revalation are superior to another’s, though, is a question that truly needs to be answered, and it’s not up to me to prove that they are all equally invalid. Show me evidence that one is true, and I will listen. Otherwise? A 600-year-old man building a boat large enough to carry two of every dung beetle and cockroach, elephant and dinosaur… yeah, doesn’t sound too plausible to me. And yet, parents every night will tell their children that the one about Noah is “real”. And we wonder why these kids are turned off by science! How confusing must that be for the nine-year-old to sit up late at night wondering about the conflict between the encyclopedia and the big book of Divine Wisdom. Did Elijah get swept up to heaven in a chariot of fire, or didn’t he? Water into wine… possible, or no? Kids are smart, and they don’t compartmentalize the way that adults do. For far too many of them, the lesson that they take from their religious upbringing is that the burden of proof is irrelevant and that science doesn’t make sense.
That is a violence against future generations, truly.
In a situation like this, where there is no clear evidence to support the extraordinary claim, and many reasons to be skeptical, a good scientist will pull out Occam’s Razor and apply it with care. (Not sure if we have any german speakers on the board, but if there are, they should check out this link to an interview with Professor Kanitscheider…link The guy is brilliant, and says it all much more eloquently than I ever could… it’s a darned shame his work isn’t widely translated.) Human beings make mistakes, and wishful thinking is one of them. Succumbing to peer pressure and believing things that don’t truly make sense just because everybody else seems so certain that those things are true is another. Scientists are human just like everyone else, but there is a reason why ~70% of them are athests [or very non-traditional theists after the fashion of Stephen Jay Gould ] vs. just 10% of the “normal” population. I’m being a typical American in that my statistics don’t include your side of the pond… sorry ’bout that. I had to dig for them in Europe, but for those interested, only 1 in 5 Europeans between the ages of 18-24 believes in a personal God anymore. To paraphrase Kanitscheider from a different interview, hiding behind the mystery of religious puzzles does not solve the problem posed by the logic of religious puzzles. Scientists are interested in solving those sorts of things and solving them correctly, moreso than the general public; thus, they are more likely to spot the flaws in the logic that leads to belief and less likely to take refuge in the mystery.
